false "Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion"

From:

Dan Jacobson

Subject:

false "Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion"

Date:

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 03:38:27 +0800

Gentlemen, I write to you today about the message seen in the shell,
$ emacs
Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
Whereupon the new emacs X-window starts up as normal anyway.
I am pretty sure this warning should not be told to the user, as it is
based on false assumptions:
I noticed that I only get this message when starting emacs 22 (21 is OK) from a
xterm -class UXTerm -u8
but not from a
crxvt-big5 -fm -eten-fixed-medium-r-*--16-*-*-*-c-*-big5-0 -fn ...
and indeed, strace shows
readv(4, [{"-eten-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-"..., 59}, {"\0", 1}], 2) = 60
open("/usr/lib/X11/XtErrorDB", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file
write(2, "Warning: Missing charsets in Str"..., 58) = 58
But the paradox is: I am starting emacs in a whole new X-window. That
the xterm I start it from does not use my favorite font doesn't
matter!
That I have Emacs*FontSet: -*-big5-0,-adobe-*-iso8859-1 in .Xresources
works fine. Emacs is miscalculating something, wrongly thinking that
something about the xterm I am starting emacs from will affect the
independent new X-window being created.